Weird science
Hungry spiders
Here’s a figure to give arachnophobic people the jitters: our planet’s spiders wolf down between 400 and 800 million tonnes of food a year.
In the process, these eightlegged carnivores keep countless insect pests, especially in forests and grassland areas, in check.
That’s according to a study by Swiss, German and Swedish scientists, which makes the first estimate of how many spiders are to be found in seven biomes on the planet. Their conclusion: there are about 25 million metric tonnes of them, most of them in forests, grasslands and shrublands, followed by croplands, deserts, urban areas and tundra areas.
The researchers used two models to calculate how much prey all the world’s spiders kill a year.
In the first they took into account how much most spiders generally need to eat to survive, as well as census data on the average spider biomass per square metre in the various biomes.
The second approach was based on prey capture observations in the field, combined with estimates of spider numbers per square metre.
They found 400 to 800 million tonnes of prey are being killed by spiders each year.
For a sense of just how much this is: all humans together consume an estimated 400 million tonnes of meat and fish a year.
Ta- ra matey
The need to communicate with a wider world coupled with a move away from the cosy, close- knit communities of the 90s has over the past two decades dramatically changed the way British people speak, new research has found.
The study, by Lancaster University and Cambridge University Press, looks at the most characteristic words of informal chit- chat in today’s Britain.
An earlier study by the team compared existing data from the 1990s to two million words of then newly collected data from 2012.
Now, the team has collected more data and compared the same 1990s collection to a bigger collection comprising five million words gathered between 2012 and 2015.
Not surprisingly, the internet age has had a massive influence on the words Britons use.
In the 1990s they were captivated by “cassettes”, today “email”, “internet”, “Facebook”, “Google”, “YouTube”, “website”, “Twitter”, “texted” and “IPad” all top the bill.
“Twenty- four” reflects the openall- hours community in which they now live — far away from a world where the “cobbler” and “playschool” were high in their vocabulary, while “permed” and “comb” were headed well and truly for the verbal dustbin, along with “ta- ra”.
“Awesome”, which replaced “marvellous” in an earlier study, is still popular and joins “massively” in the top 15.
The word “croquet” has taken a hit along with expressions such as “mucking”, “whatsername”, “golly” and “matey”.
“Boxer”, “crossword” and “draught” were all in the 1990s’ top 15; newcomer “yoga” eases itself comfortably into the current top 15.
Ripper’s last victim
Scientists who led research around the discovery of the remains of King Richard III are involved in a project to identify the last known victim of Jack the Ripper — Mary Jane Kelly.
The University of Leicester team has been commissioned by author Patricia Cornwell to examine the feasibility of finding the exact burial location and the likely condition and survival of her remains.
This is being done as a precursor to possible DNA analysis because Wynne Weston- Davies believes Mary Jane Kelly was his great- aunt, Elizabeth Weston- Davies. In a report, The Mary Jane Kelly
Project, the research team has revealed the likelihood of locating and identifying the last known victim of Britain’s most infamous serial killer. Jack the Ripper is thought to have killed at least five young women in the Whitechapel area of London between August and November 1888.
But the research team isn’t optimistic. Said study co- author Dr Turi King: “As information presently stands, a successful search for Kelly’s remains would require a Herculean effort that would likely take years of research, would be prohibitively costly and would cause unwarranted disturbance to an unknown number of individuals buried in a cemetery that is still in daily use, with no guarantee of success.”